Overcoming Law

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Overcoming Law by Richard A. Posner

Book Description

Richard Posner discusses the structure and behaviour of the legal profession; constitutional theory; interdisciplinary approaches to law; the nature of legal reasoning; and legal pragmatism. Although written by a sitting judge, the book does not avoid controversy, and contains frank appraisals of feminist and critical race theories, the behaviour of the German and British judiciaries in wartime, and the excesses of social constructionist theories of sexual behaviour. Throughout, the book is unified by Posner's stance, which is pragmatic in philosophy, economic in methodology, and liberal (in the sense of John Stuart Mill's liberalism) in politics. Eschewing jargon and technicalities, it should make a contribution to the debate about the role of law in our society.

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Books By Author Richard A. Posner

Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics criticize judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges to dismiss academic discourse as divorced from reality. Richard Posner reflects on the causes and consequences of this widening gap and what can be done to close it.

Presents the main obstacles to coping with the dizzying pace of technological advance. The author calls for legal realism - gathering facts, considering context, and reaching a sensible conclusion that inflicts little collateral damage on other areas of the law.

Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes, yet their behavior is not well understood, even among themselves. Using statistical methods, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making to dispel the mystery of how decisions from district courts to the Supreme Court are made.

Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.

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